The plague dogs

THINGS were looking bad for the lions of the Serengeti. A strange sickness was sweeping through the population, claiming lions of all ages, from young cubs to adults in their prime. Their paws twitched. They seemed disoriented and depressed. Some had seizures, their limbs flailing and their faces twisted into a lopsided sneer. Before the year was out, the mysterious disease had killed a thousand lions-a third of the population in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park-before spreading north across the border into Kenya.

That was 1994. Within a few months, blood and tissue tests revealed that the lions had died from a disease they weren't supposed to get: canine distemper, a dog disease caused by a morbillivirus related to measles. Careful molecular detective work identified the virus as a strain from domestic dogs, and a search for the source led to villages on the western edge of the Serengeti.

Distemper is ...

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